Breath of a Samsāric Reality
By Yenny Hernández Valdés
Daylene Rodríguez (Matanzas, 1978) is not only one of the contemporary photographers with an ascending and maturing career in recent times in Cuba, she is also the “scorpion” with the greatest impetus, will and charisma I know, an astrological condition that, I am sure, is one of the starting engines of her perseverance and determination in the thorny world of art. Her thirst for professional growth and daring has led her on a path of constant searches and progressions, and it is appreciable if we observe in retrospect, perhaps in a timeline starting back in 2006 until now, how she has evolved and matured her lens, her gaze, her objective, without leaving aside a macro concept that transverses her work and that unfolds in the sufferings of the current subject.
An interesting plus in Daylene Rodríguez’s photographic career is the skill she has cultivated to freeze true scenes, without previous additions. She captures that instant in which, before her eye, the critical and emotional condenses, where her characters perpetuate the very circumstance that envelops and martyrs them.
And that is precisely another constant in her work: the human condition in its daily occurrence. Daylene offers us a humanistic and sociological photography through which she translates, in a semiotic key, the vicissitudes of the current subject, the difficult problems that have marked and mark that personal history, resigned most of the time to their destiny and their reality: a samsārica1 reality in my opinion, in which we identify ourselves or see ourselves reflected from some point of view. Hence also his taste for black and white photography, for that dramatism that he manages to accentuate through the high contrasts, the marked lights and shadows.
The artist insists, from singularity and aesthetic elegance, on a type of image that is both dramatic and lyrical at the same time; on capturing the individual in desolate environments, old, residual both physically and spiritually. In this sense, she has focused her lens and her eye on showing us the daily crusade faced by her protagonists, the breath of survival in the face of anguish, idleness, the passing of time, loneliness, helplessness, death… She places us at a high point of sensitivity, she stirs our senses and conscience, she shakes us from the indifference towards others that we often feel in the midst of the maelstrom of everyday life.
With Aliento de cenizas (Breath of Ashes) ( 2015) she recreates, without preamble or technical make-up, the journey of his protagonists at its autumnal point. She starts from the black and white of her scenes to capture the grayness that the inevitable passage of time encloses in the soul. But she is not satisfied with just taking a few images of the guests who inhabit the old people’s homes. With her characteristic fearlessness, she goes further and delves into the dynamics of this coexistence; she bursts into the twists and turns of loneliness, uneasiness, oblivion, the visceral abandonment in these places, the sadness in the gazes, the icy breath of what may be the last breath. She spares no expressive resources to bring out tired spirits, faces defeated by infallible time, bodies ready to the fate of waiting and remembering. To this she adds broken glass as a dowry and symbolism of the personal destruction that loneliness brings. These subjects are a sort of abandoned house in which their own ghosts are reflected, crowded inside gray and absent eyes.
Daylene Rodríguez collects personal stories in which the last light of the passage of time is glimpsed in an armchair that balances tanned bodies and stirred memories of what was and what could have been, of past defeats and victories. Aliento de cenizas is just that: a testimony in the plural; it is the last breath that shows the dent, the erosion, the remains of a tiring conversation face to face with oblivion and loneliness.
But she also discourses from the image in the first person, and it was precisely her constant search to learn more about her roots and to find herself that led her to develop El mundo de Karoline (Karoline’s World) ( 2020-2023) and Regreso a Turieno (Return to Turieno) (2022), two series that treasure a personal world, full of intimate jewels displayed both in longing and in the rescue of objects and memories.
El mundo de Karoline becomes a visualization of Daylene’s day-to-day life as a child on the grounds of the family farm where she grew up in Matanzas, her hometown. This time, Karoline, her cousin’s daughter, catches the artist’s attention. With camera in hand, she intrudes into the little girl’s family environment that awakens the memory and turns memories into vivid moments. This is an introspective journey to a past but joyful childhood; remembrances that turn this mature person into the girl of yesteryear who plays with time through the camera, undoes it in her concept of universal constant, to join two worlds in an accumulation of sensations in what was the place of confluence of five generations of women who have lived and left their mark on the family farm where it all began.
With that premise and the will of personal search, Daylene “walked” to the past and arrived at her great-great-grandmother’s house in Spain, in the town of Turieno, to shake the oblivion of the home-cradle of her ancestors. Thus was born Regreso a Turieno, that rural and colorful place where Vicenta, her great-great-grandmother, lived before emigrating to Cuba. She dug among the ruins, searched for her beginnings, starched her own history, framed herself as part of the process, and perpetuated in black and white her journey into nostalgia, her encounter with that which remained at the mercy of time and abandonment, where despite the dust, it seemed that nothing had changed: there was the last bottle, the friendly mirror, the clothesline where the damp clothes fluttered, the chair and table as witnesses of the meetings at the end of the day or the morning breakfast, a family photo no longer clear, the rocking chair of the well-deserved rest. Everything was still there, dirty, corroded, turned into an emotional breeding ground, testimonies of a past but latent time for the artist.
“Karoline” and ‘Turieno’ intersect in emotions and symbolism. They constitute the visual representation of two personal dimensions, of two space-times in which the artist unfolded her sensations and memories during both encounters.
In her creative journey, Daylene Rodríguez has cultivated an aesthetic line in which she captures details of the human soul to touch fiber and conscience. She paralyzes our gaze in her works with the characteristic mastery of a critical but sensitive eye and captures scenes of an everyday life completely removed from sweetness and sympathy, whose characters are seasoned with the typical anguish of a complex and tormented reality.
1 The word Samsāra comes from Sanskrit and means to pass through different states. It is the cycle of birth, life, death and incarnation in the philosophical traditions of India.
